With the development of social economy, the scales and quantities of large-scale places for logistics and people, such as supermarkets, airports, stations, exhibition centers, logistics warehouses and so on, continuously increase, which makes the past people-oriented model fail to satisfy people's demands. Under such a circumstance, a robot capable of working autonomously comes into being. This robot is a multi-functional integrated system with environmental awareness, path planning, dynamic decision making, behavior control and alarm module being integrated, and can realize regular, mobile and self-help work.
Specifically, in the logistics field, the robot can serve as a transport device, which is provided therein with a walking device and a carrying device. Goods in a storage area at a fixed position are carried by the carrying device, and then the carried goods is transported by the walking device to a specified goods arrangement area. When the carried goods is delivered or unloaded by the carrying device in the current goods arrangement area, in order to ensure that the robot can normally and orderly work cyclically, each robot needs to return to a specified storage area according to a specified path, to further repeat the work of picking up the goods—transporting the goods—unloading the goods—returning to pick up the goods.
In the above, in the situation that there is only one storage area and one goods arrangement area mentioned above, the path of each robot is singular, it is relatively easy to control the movement path of the robot in this case, but when there are relatively a lot of the above-mentioned storage areas and goods arrangement areas, there also will be relatively a lot of corresponding robot paths, at this time, when a cluster of robots of a large quantity and a high density carry out large-scale dynamic activities above, each robot, after delivering or carrying the goods, needs to depart orderly as soon as possible more, while the robots going to depart might affect other robots being working in the place, besides, when the cluster of robots have one necessary point to pass through on the backflow paths in the place, if this point should be passed through within a short period of time, crowding may easily occur, resulting in reduction of the overall working efficiency, therefore, an optimized departure scheduling plan is needed so as to improve the working efficiency.
The inventors found in researches that no effective solution has been put forward at present for the problem of ordered departure and improvement of the working efficiency of the cluster of robots of a large quantity and a high density when carrying out the large-scale dynamic activities above in a place. Besides, in the process of the cluster of robots carrying out the large-scale dynamic activities in the place, if the cluster of robots has one necessary point to pass through in the place, when this point should be passed through within a short period of time, it is easy to result in crowding, further causing reduction of the overall working efficiency.